Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

 Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website. 

Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Slegg, 2022). The first step in creating a digital competitive strategy is defining who the competition is. For Summit Community Bank, this is done using two criterias, market proximity and asset size. In my organization, we use S&P Global Intelligence to run deposit market share reports within each of our markets. In the market share reporting, it lists the top ten to twenty banks in that market radius based on deposits within the last year and ranks them accordingly. While larger markets may have several national banks that top market share lists, Summit Community Bank focuses on competitors that are around the same asset size and branch number as our organization, as this allows us to make a much more realistic estimation of what our potential market share penetration is and the probability of increasing market share in that location is feasible. Some markets have fewer entities than others and that can change how difficult it is to capture additional share.

From a digital perspective, we may look at 1-2 realistic competitors in each of our diverse markets, or we find a peer in multiple markets and see if we can find online opportunities to compete. For example, for Summit Community Bank, a bank that we often compete with in multiple locations in southern West Virginia is First Community Bank. Because they are close in asset size, have a similar amount of branches, and have many locations in the same market as Summit, we would use them for competitive analysis.

We also employ social listening tactics to track news of any mergers, acquisitions, sales, and changes of regional banks to see if we need to concentrate our efforts in a particular area or track new banks that might emerge in those markets. For example, when one of our competitors closed a branch in the Hot Springs, VA market, we made sure to run both traditional and digital marketing campaigns to encourage potential customers to switch banks.

In SEMrush however, we can also monitor these competitors using the domain overview, traffic analytics, keyword gap, backlink gap, and organic research tools under the competitive analysis section. In my organization, we tend to track and measure our competitors on a quarterly basis so we can compare trends with our financial results or ad hoc when considering campaigns to run and need to take a look at the competitive landscape in a certain market. One metric that we would use as a point of differentiation is looking at the organic keywords that our competitors are ranking for and see if those keywords are in direct competition with the keywords that we want to rank for, it can also give us insight into what our competitor’s product or service focus is. For example, if I put First Community Bank into the organic research tool, and see that mortgage is one of the top keywords that they are ranking for, then that may mean they are looking to drive mortgages or that the on page-SEO that they have for their mortgage product is high relevant to their audience, which means we might want to see how that page is structured and take a look at its content if we want promote a similar product in the future and want to look for opportunities for where our mortgage product can fill a need or gap. We can also use the organic research tool to analyze our competitor’s top pages and take note of where most of their web traffic is going and how often it's bouncing. This might allow us to identify products or services where our organization needs to improve. For example, let’s say that First Community Bank offers a checking product that we don’t, and we see that the checking product page has a significant amount of traffic, that may tell us that their product is popular with audiences.

SEMrush also lists the Keyword Gap tool as an important point of differentiation, because it “provides a detailed look at the competitor's search landscape for any chosen search term. When you can identify any gaps in that landscape, you can work on closing or taking advantage of them” (Slegg, 2022). This includes both shared keywords and keywords that our competitor is ranking for that we’re not. Does that mean there is a product or service that we’re not taking advantage of? Do we need to work on our SEO for a certain page? For our brand, highlighting our own unique products is something that is important because they have many features that our competitors don't, such as an ITM (interactive teller machine) and comparable interest checking accounts that other community banks have trouble sustaining. By working on optimizing the individual product pages (or creating individual product pages) for these features, I would predict that we could see an increase in how our site performs in the SERPs. 

Another point of differentiation that SEMrush notes, but would be something that we would look at emphasizing for our brand would be search engine authority (Slegg, 2022). We know that with larger competitors in larger markets like Bank of America, or USAA, or Navy Federal Credit Union, it can be hard to compete with their well-established search engine authority, and because they offer similar products and services, it can be more difficult to rank above them in the SERPs. One thing the SEMrush mentions that checking authority can do is allow companies the opportunity to realistically look for long-tail more specific key phrases that these larger organizations may not be targeting and use them as a starting place for SEO. 

I think what’s important for our organization is that our SEO highlights content, products, and services that are unique to our organization. I think it is a much more productive use of time to focus on the things that our organization does on its own that is different from our competitors, whether its a product or service offering, or some other differentiation. For example, in 2022, Summit Community Bank was named Forbes and Statista’s Best Bank in West Virginia, so being able to use that accolade and create web content around it can help those people looking for the “best bank WV” or “WV banks” in the search engine can help us exist in a niche that isn’t exactly something that our competitor can do. It also might be feasible to try ranking for our ITM (interactive teller machine) because this convenient service offers much value to consumers because of extended banking hours. Focusing on what our organization does best and using that to set us apart is also what will help make our SEO efforts successful.

References

Slegg, J. (2022, March 10). How to do an SEO competitive analysis. Semrush Blog. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-do-seo-competitive-analysis/